She Loves It But Leaves It
Pop star MADONNA has put her controversial Hollywood Hills home, painted in yellow and red stripes after she bought it a couple of years ago, on the market at $7 million.
Built in the 1920s and used in the 1930s as a gambling den by Bugsy Siegel, the nine-story, Mediterranean-style house was all white when Madonna bought it for $5 million.
“She basically restored it and kept its integrity,” said Madison Offenhauser, Jon Douglas Co., Beverly Hills. He listed the home with Barry Peele, Fred Sands’ Directors office.
The house has four formal bedrooms, two maids rooms and a chauffeurs’ quarters, all in about 7,800 square feet. The home is on 3.5 acres overlooking Lake Hollywood.
“She’s madly in love with the house but spends so much time in Florida and New York,” said Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s publicist. “If she could move the house there, brick by brick, she would.”
Madonna owns a 1920s-era waterfront home in Miami, which she bought for about $4 million five months before she purchased her home in Hollywood. She also has an apartment in New York.
Her production company, Maverick Entertainment, is based in Los Angeles. It co-distributed, with Miramax, one of the most acclaimed films of 1993, “Farewell My Concubine.” It also produced her most recent film, “Dangerous Game,” released last year.
Madonna, 36, is one of pop music’s wealthiest entertainers. She signed a multimedia pact with Time Warner in 1992 worth about $60 million. Her single “Take a Bow” and album “Bedtime Stories” are in the top 10 nationally. And she appears in Quentin Tarantino’s next movie, “Four Rooms,” which finished shooting in December.
She also appeared in “Dick Tracy” (1990), “A League of Their Own” (1991) and “Body of Evidence” (1993).
Laker star VLADE DIVAC and his wife, ANA, have purchased a three-bedroom townhouse for her sister in Pacific Palisades, near their own residence, sources say.
The sister had been living with the Divacs for a couple of years, since fleeing civil war in what is now known as Bosnia-Herzegovina, the former Yugoslavia, where Divac and his wife were born and raised.
Divac, a Laker center for five years, is playing this season as a power forward after finishing last season as the first person to lead the team in scoring and rebounding since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1984-85. Divac has a six-year, $22.8-million contract that will pay $3.33 million this year.
He was only 21 when he came to L.A. in 1989 to play for the Lakers after being on the 1988 Yugoslavian national team that won the silver medal at the Seoul Olympics. He didn’t even speak English when he came to L.A. Now, with two sons born here, he considers Los Angeles his home, and he has said, “When I go to Europe, I am homesick, but I am homesick for L.A.”
He has not forgotten his roots, however. Two years ago, he started a children’s relief fund in his native country, and though he was born a Serb, he specified that aid should go to all children, whether they are Serb, Croatian or Muslim.
The Divacs, who bought a newly built home behind gates in Pacific Palisades in 1991, purchased the nearly 2,000-square-foot townhouse for close to $327,000, sources say.
Richard and Antonia Bavetz of Fred Sands Realtors, Pacific Palisades, represented the couple in buying the townhouse. The Bavetzes also participated in representing film composer David McHugh in the recent sale of his Mandeville Canyon home.
U.S. Trade Representative MICKEY KANTOR and his wife, former NBC News correspondent HEIDI SCHULMAN, have sold their former Beverly Hills area home to their tenants, lyricist Gerry Goffin and his wife, cookbook author Linda Zimmerman (“Chicken Soup: International Recipes From Traditional to Contemporary,” “Grilles & Grains”).
Goffin wrote some of rock music’s most enduring songs during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s with his then-wife, Carole King. Among the songs were such No. 1 hits as the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof” and the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”
The house, originally on the market at just under $2.5 million, sold for about $1.5 million, sources say. Built in 1938, the gated, nearly 1.5-acre home has four bedrooms plus maid’s quarters in about 6,000 square feet.
Jan Barnow of Prudential Rodeo Realty in Westwood represented the buyers. Mark Rosenberg and Patty August had the listing when they were with the Enright Co. They are now with Dalton, Brown & Long.
Before Kantor bought the home and lived in it in 1989, it was owned by producer John Foreman, sources say. Foreman formed a production company with Paul Newman in 1968 and produced such films as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
The 1920s-era, Beverly Hills home of director JEAN NEGULESCO, who died in 1993 at age 93, is on the market at nearly $2 million. Negulesco directed “How to Marry a Millionaire,” starring Marilyn Monroe, and “Daddy Long Legs,” co-starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron.
Negulesco bought the home in the ‘50s but lived most of the past 25 years in Spain. Many celebrities have leased the estate, which has a four-bedroom main house and two-bedroom guest cottage. The listing is shared by Donna Fields and Michael Libow, both of Prudential/Rodeo Realty, Beverly Hills.
